Why Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Filed

Syndicated
columnist Bob Novak and officials speaking on behalf of
White House political adviser Karl Rove have attempted to
convince the American people that there wasn't a White House
campaign to smear and discredit former Ambassador Joseph
Wilson three years ago for speaking out publicly against the
Bush administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

In a stunning interview Wednesday on Fox News, which came
across as yet another orchestrated Rovian crusade against
the former ambassador, Novak claimed he did not see any
evidence of a White House smear campaign against Wilson in
the days prior to a column he wrote that disclosed Wilson's
wife's covert CIA status and identity.

Novak's July
14, 2003, column took Ambassador Wilson to task for accusing
the administration, in a New York Times op-ed the week
before, of twisting the intelligence during the lead-up to
the Iraq war.

Novak wrote that Plame was responsible
for sending her husband on a fact-finding trip to Niger to
determine if Iraq was trying to acquire yellowcake uranium
from the African country. The trip, Novak was trying to
impress upon his readers, was the result of nepotism and as
such Wilson's findings should not be trusted.

Novak,
in his interview on Fox News, where he now works as a
consultant, called the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's
CIA status an accidental slip by one of his sources during
the course of an hour-long background interview on foreign
and domestic policy issues.

An all too willing Brit
Hume, and for that matter the rest of the Washington press
corps, lapped up Novak's version of the truth, and have
treated the Wilson story as a non-issue, without so much as
disclosing the documentary proof that has surfaced during
the course of a three year federal investigation that would
prove Novak and others in the media have been peddling lies
in hopes of manipulating public perception about the truth
regarding White House officials' roles in the Plame leak.

A month ago, Robert Luskin, the attorney defending Rove in
the CIA leak case, claimed he received a faxed
correspondence from Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald
indicating that Rove would likely not be charged with crimes
- barring any additional evidence - related to his role in
the leak.

Fitzgerald's office would not confirm that
the prosecutor sent such a letter nor would his office
confirm that Rove is truly free from the burden of a
criminal indictment. But that has not stopped the media and
even some naïve bloggers from taking Luskin at his word and
printing news stories with sentences like "Fitzgerald said
Rove won't be charged" when in fact Fitzgerald said no such
thing.

In helping to carry the message Rove and Novak
are disseminating, the mainstream media and a slew of
extreme right-wing bloggers have helped shield this
administration from accepting responsibility for one of the
most egregious crimes that has taken place since the
presidency of Richard Nixon.

Earlier Thursday, the
Wilsons filed a civil suit against Rove, Vice President Dick
Cheney, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief
of staff, who is the only White House official who has been
indicted in the leak case.

The civil suit may help
vindicate the Wilsons and hold these officials accountable
for their actions three years ago, but it's worth revisiting
some of the evidentiary findings that Fitzgerald's probe has
turned up since he was appointed Special Prosecutor in
December 2003 that prove the White House's culpability in
the leak.

In April, Fitzgerald stated in a court
filing related to a discovery motion in the Libby case that
his investigators have obtained evidence that proves
"multiple" White House officials conspired to discredit
Wilson.

Libby's attorneys said, according to the
filing, that they were entitled to the government's evidence
in order to prove Libby was not engaged in a "plot" to
discredit Wilson.

However, Fitzgerald says in the
filing that long before Wilson published his July 6, 2003,
op-ed in the New York Times there were pieces of evidence
"some of which have been provided to defendant and there
were conversations in which defendant participated, that
reveal a strong desire by many, including multiple people in
the White House, to repudiate Mr. Wilson before and after
July 14, 2003."

Although he made it abundantly clear
that Libby is not charged with conspiracy, Fitzgerald argues
that Libby's suggestion that there was no White House plot
to discredit Wilson is ludicrous, given the amount of
evidence he has in his possession that suggests
otherwise.

"Given that there is evidence that other
White House officials with whom defendant spoke prior to
July 14, 2003, discussed Wilson's wife's employment with the
press both prior to, and after, July 14, 2003 ... it is hard
to conceive of what evidence there could be that would
disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish'
Wilson," Fitzgerald wrote in the court filing.

Moreover, this court filing describes in detail how White
House press secretary Scott McClellan came to publicly
exonerate Libby and Rove during a press briefing in October
2003, three months after Plame Wilson's identity was
unmasked.

The filing clearly states that Libby lied
about his role in the leak when McClellan asked him about it
in October 2003. Libby, with Vice President Cheney's
backing, persuaded the press secretary to clear his name
during one of his morning press briefings, and prepared
notes for him to use. "Though defendant knew that another
White House official had spoken to Novak in advance of
Novak's column and that official had learned in advance that
Novak would be publishing information about Wilson's wife,
defendant did not disclose that fact to other White House
officials (including the Vice President) but instead
prepared a handwritten statement of what he wished White
House Press Secretary McClellan would say to exonerate
him:

People have made too much of
the difference in How I described Karl and Libby
I've talked to Libby. I said it was ridiculous about
Karl. And it is ridiculous about Libby. Libby
was not the source of the Novak story. And he did not
leak classified information."

"As a
result of defendant's request, on October 4, 2003, White
House Press Secretary McClellan stated that he had spoken to
Mr. Libby (as well as Mr. Rove and Elliot Abrams) and "those
individuals assured me that they were not involved in
this."

McClellan's public statement and the fact that
President Bush vowed to fire anyone in his office involved
in the leak were motivating factors that led Libby to lie
during an interview with FBI investigators in November 2003,
Fitzgerald states in the court filing:

"Thus, as
defendant approached his first FBI interview he knew that
the White House had publicly staked its credibility on there
being no White House involvement in the leaking of
information about Ms. Wilson and that, at defendant's
specific request through the Vice President, the White House
had publicly proclaimed that defendant was 'not involved in
this.'"

On September 14, 2003, during an interview
with Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney
maintained that he didn't know Wilson or have any knowledge
about his Niger trip or who was responsible for leaking his
wife's name to the media.

"I don't know Joe Wilson,"
Cheney said, in response to Russert, who quoted Wilson as
saying there was no truth to the Niger uranium claims. "I've
never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson - I don't who sent Joe
Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he
came back ... I don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn't
judge him. I have no idea who hired him."

That was a
lie. Cheney knew Wilson well. He spent months obsessing
about him.

Cheney and then-Deputy National Security
Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March
2003 to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson for
publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence
on Iraq, according to current and former administration
officials.

In interviews over the past year, sources
close to the case said their roles included digging up or
"inventing" embarrassing information on the former
ambassador that could be used against him, preparing memos
and classified material on Wilson for Cheney and the
National Security Council, and attending meetings in
Cheney's office to discuss with Cheney, Hadley, and others
the efforts that would be taken to discredit Wilson.

A
former CIA official who has worked in the
counter-proliferation division, and who is familiar with the
undercover work Wilson's wife did for the agency, said
Cheney and Hadley visited CIA headquarters a day or two
after Joseph Wilson was interviewed on CNN.

In the
interview, which took place two and a half weeks before the
start of the Iraq war, Wilson said the administration was
more interested in redrawing the map of the Middle East to
pursue its own foreign policy objectives than in dealing
with the so-called terrorist threat.

"The underlying
objective, as I see it, the more I look at this, is less and
less disarmament, and it really has little to do with
terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and
conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation
of terrorists," Wilson said in a March 2, 2003, interview
with CNN.

"So you look at what's underpinning this,
and you go back and you take a look at who's been
influencing the process. And it's been those who really
believe that our objective must be far grander, and that is
to redraw the political map of the Middle East," Wilson
added.

But it wasn't Wilson at first who Cheney was so
upset about when he visited the CIA in March 2003.

During the same CNN segment in which Wilson was interviewed,
former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright made
similar comments about the rationale for the Iraq war and
added that he believed UN weapons inspectors should be given
more time to search the country for weapons of mass
destruction.

The National Security Council and CIA
officials said Cheney had visited CIA headquarters and asked
several CIA officials to dig up dirt on Albright, and to put
together a dossier that would discredit his work that could
be distributed to the media.

"Vice President Cheney
was more concerned with Mr. Albright," the CIA official
said. "The international community had been saying that
inspectors should have more time, that the US should not set
a deadline. The Vice President felt Mr. Albright's remarks
would fuel the debate."

A week later, Wilson was
interviewed on CNN again. This was the first time Wilson
ridiculed the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had
tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. "Well, this
particular case is outrageous. We know a lot about the
uranium business in Niger, and for something like this to go
unchallenged by US - the US government - is just simply
stupid. It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have
had an embassy there since the early '60s. All this stuff is
open. It's a restricted market of buyers and sellers,"
Wilson said in the March 8, 2003, CNN interview. "For this
to have gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but
more to the point, it taints the whole rest of the case that
the government is trying to build against Iraq."

What
Wilson wasn't at liberty to disclose during that interview,
because the information was still classified, was that he
had personally traveled to Niger a year earlier on behalf of
the CIA to investigate whether Iraq had in fact tried to
purchase uranium from the African country. Cheney had asked
the CIA in 2002 to look into the allegation, which turned
out to be based on forged documents but was included in
President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address
nonetheless.

Wilson's comments enraged Cheney, all of
the officials said, because they were seen as a personal
attack against the Vice President, who was instrumental in
getting the intelligence community to cite the Niger claims
in government reports to build a case for war against
Iraq.

The former ambassador's stinging rebuke also
caught the attention of Stephen Hadley, who had played an
even bigger role in the Niger controversy, having been
responsible for allowing President Bush to cite the
allegations in his State of the Union address.

At this
time, the international community, various media outlets,
and the International Atomic Energy Agency had called into
question the veracity of the Niger documents. Mohammed
ElBaradei, head of IAEA, told the UN Security Council on
March 7, 2003, that the Niger documents were forgeries and
could not be used to prove Iraq was a nuclear threat.

Wilson's comments in addition to ElBaradei's UN report were
seen as a threat to the administration's planned attack
against Iraq, the officials said, which would take place 11
days later.

Hadley had avoided making public comments
about the veracity of the Niger documents, going as far as
ignoring a written request by IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei
to share the intelligence with his agency so his inspectors
could verify the claims. Hadley is said to have known the
Niger documents were crude forgeries, but pushed the
administration to cite them as evidence that Iraq was a
nuclear threat, according to the State Department officials,
who said they personally told Hadley in a written report
that the documents were bogus.

CIA and State
Department officials said that a day after Wilson's March 8,
2003, CNN appearance, they attended a meeting at the Vice
President's office with Cheney, Hadley and others who worked
in the Office of the Vice President and it was there that a
decision was made to discredit Wilson.

"The way I
remember it," the CIA official said about that first meeting
he attended in Cheney's office, "is that the vice president
was obsessed with Wilson. He called him an 'asshole,' a
son-of-a-bitch. He took his comments very personally. He
wanted us to do everything in our power to destroy his
reputation and he wanted to be kept up to date about the
progress."

The CIA, State Department and National
Security Council officials said that early on they had
passed on information about Wilson to Cheney and Libby that
purportedly showed Wilson as being a "womanizer" and that he
had dabbled in drugs during his youth, allegations that are
apparently false, they said.

The officials said that
during the meeting, Hadley said he would respond to Wilson's
comments by writing an editorial about the Iraqi threat,
which it was hoped would be a first step in overshadowing
Wilson's CNN appearance.

A column written by Hadley
that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2003,
was redistributed to newspaper editors by the State
Department on March 10, 2003, two days after Wilson was
interviewed on CNN. The column, "Two Potent Iraqi Weapons:
Denial and Deception" once again raised the issue that Iraq
had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

Cheney
appeared on Meet the Press on March 16, 2003, to respond to
ElBaradei's assertion that the Niger documents were
forgeries.

"I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong,"
Cheney said during the interview. "[The IAEA] has
consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam
Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe
they're any more valid this time than they've been in the
past."

Behind the scenes, Wilson had been speaking to
various members of Congress about the administration's use
of the Niger documents and had said the intelligence the
White House relied upon was flawed, said one of the State
Department officials who had a conversation with Wilson.
Wilson's criticism of the administration's intelligence
eventually leaked out to reporters, but with the Iraq war
just a week away, the story was never covered.

Wilson
said he had attempted to contact the White House through
various channels after the State of the Union address to get
the administration to correct the public record.

"I
had direct discussions with the State Department, Senate
committees," Wilson said in April in a speech to college
students and faculty at California State University
Northridge. "I had numerous conversations to change what
they were saying publicly. I had a civic duty to hold my
government to account for what it had said and done."

Wilson said he was rebuffed at every instance and that he
received word, through then-National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice that he could state his case in writing in
a public forum. And that's exactly what he did. Wilson
decided to write an op-ed in the New York Times and expose
the administration for knowingly "twisting" the intelligence
on the Iraqi nuclear threat to make a case for war. Wilson
wrote that had he personally traveled to Niger to check out
the Niger intelligence and had determined it was bogus.

"Nothing more, nothing less than challenging the government
to come clean on this matter," Wilson said. "That's all I
did."

With no sign of weapons of mass destruction to
be found in Iraq, news accounts started to call into
question the credibility of the administration's pre-war
intelligence. In May 2003, Wilson re-emerged at a political
conference in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic
Policy Committee.

There he told the New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristoff that he was the special envoy
who had traveled to Niger in February 2002 to check out
allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the
country. He told Kristoff he had briefed a CIA analyst that
the claims were untrue. Wilson said he believed the
administration had ignored his report and had been dishonest
with Congress and the American people.

When Kristoff's
column was published in the Times, the CIA official said, "a
request came in from Cheney that was passed to me that said
'the vice president wants to know whether Joe Wilson went to
Niger.' I'm paraphrasing. But that's more or less what I was
asked to find out."

In his column, Kristoff Had
accused Cheney of allowing the truth about the Niger
documents the administration used to build a case for war to
go "missing in action." The failure of US armed forces to
find any WMDs in Iraq in two months following the start of
the war had been blamed on Cheney.

What in the
previous months had been a request to gather information
that could be used to discredit Wilson turned into a
full-scale effort involving the Office of the Vice
President, the National Security Council, and the State
Department to find out how Wilson came to be chosen to
investigate the uranium allegations involving Iraq and
Niger.

"Cheney and Libby made it clear that Wilson had
to be shut down," the CIA official said. "This wasn't just
about protecting the credibility of the White House. For the
vice president, going after Wilson was purely personal, in
my opinion."

Cheney was personally involved in this
aspect of the information gathering process as well,
visiting CIA headquarters to inquire about Wilson, the CIA
official said. Hadley had also raised questions about Wilson
during this month with the State Department officials and
asked that information regarding Wilson's trip to Niger be
sent to his attention at the National Security Council.

That's when Valerie Plame Wilson's name popped up showing
that she was a covert CIA
operative.

*************

Jason Leopold spent two years covering
California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief
of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year
cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and
will be a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t. He is the
author of the new book NEWS JUNKIE. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview.

In response to the challenges facing Scoop and the media industry we’ve instituted an Ethical Paywall to keep the news freely available to the public.
People who use Scoop for work need to be licensed through a ScoopPro subscription under this model, they also get access to exclusive news tools.

2018 has been quite a year for Scoop. We are so thrilled to have successfully met the funding target for the first stage of the ‘Scoop 3.0’ plan raising $36,000. This means we can now proceed with the planning phase for the delivery of this bold vision for a community-owned, participatory, independent newsroom... More>>

Morrison is a masterfully ignorant practitioner who finds himself in the arms of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yet still keen to press the idea that international law is being observed. More>>